Playing RuneScape Helped Me Understand Digital Assets

Looking back, I never thought that my 12-year-old self would be so influential in helping me understand the complex world of digital assets that's now emerging.

By owning a collection of items I had earned in a game, which I could later trade or sell, I now understand Bitcoin and NFT's through a lens that young Dani would be proud of.

I used to play RuneScape everyday with my friends after school. In this online multiplayer computer game, I would work on my avatar's skills (like woodworking or fishing) to earn goods which would get stored in my in-game inventory. I would later trade or sell them and then spend my earned Gold on armor, tools, food or luxuries.

Rinse and repeat... it was the best!

This in-game inventory was extremely valuable to me.

If it was wiped, my character was essentially worthless. All of the hours spent collecting lobsters or tree logs be gone. I would have probably cried for days.

How come there's never been an equivalent "Internet inventory"?

In the Internet that we're used to, it's never been intuitive to think about the concept of ownership.

Think about it — nothing has ever been yours in the Internet in the same way that you own the device you're reading this with.

The device is yours because you can sell it. You can sell your clothes too if you wanted. You own these things.

But could you sell anything on the Internet before? Without any third-party being involved in the buyer-seller transaction, of course.

The reason you couldn't is that the buyer had no way to prove - with full trust - to all of its fellow market participants (Internet users) that they now owned a digital item.

Centralization (Chase bank, RuneScape servers) is the only viable way to solve this.

Now, powered by mathematics and cryptography, blockchain technology is the infrastructure that gives everyone on the Internet the certainty that something you own digitally is truly yours.

Now there's no need for a third-party to do the validation, giving us a beautiful mix of the Internet as we know it and a decentralized personal inventory that everybody trusts.

The possibilities with this are truly endless.

Work on your online avatar, build your inventory, sell, trade and have fun along the way. It's now possible.